Every Wednesday, WCC’s Windward Gaming Group meets in Hale Kuhina 112 to hang out and play board games. The doors open at 3:30 p.m. and don’t close until around 10 p.m.
While there might only be a few members present in the afternoon because people are still in class or driving over from other campuses, by 6 p.m. the whole room is booming with 20-40 people playing games, talking story or doing homework.
Around 8 p.m., members make the quick drive down Kea‘ahala Rd. to get food from Jack in the Box and head right back to keep on gaming. By 10 p.m., all the games are put away, and people say their goodbyes until next time.
Nicolas Logue, WCC theatre assistant professor who also teaches IS 271: Introduction to Games and Gaming, started Windward Gaming Club three years ago.
“I really enjoyed my gaming club when I was at university years and years and years ago,” Logue said. “I noticed that we didn’t have one here on campus, so I thought I might as well start one up for the students. Now we meet up every week.”
William Philippus is a first year student at WCC who joined the club at the beginning of the semester.
“It’s a really fun club,” Philippus said. “There’s a lot of diversity and a lot of different games that you can play. There’s anything from Risk, which is a high class strategy game, to things like Coup, which is a very fast-paced oriented mind game. We even have Dungeons & Dragons if that’s your thing.”
Philippus said his favorite game to play is DC Deck Builder.
“It’s basically a game which you slowly build your deck by buying cards and increasing your victory as you go while also trying to screw over other people,” he said.
WCC alumna Reina Neves found out about the club through her boyfriend who also went to school here. She has been in the club since its beginning and has seen the club grow over the years.
“We have a lot more games now,” Neves said. “We started out with just a few but then people would donate or we brought our own. We also used club money to buy new games.”
The club currently has around 70 different games, including Cards Against Humanity, Coup and Warhammer 40K.
In order to buy new games, the club raises money by selling snacks and soda. They have had bake sales in past years. The club also accepts board game donations.
Julian Gracia transferred from WCC to UH Mānoa a couple of semesters ago but has remained the club president for the last year. He and other officers have been putting more effort into recruitment.
“Especially this semester, we’ve really tried hard to do flyers, send out weekly emails, back to school events, and we also tried introducing the club at Frosh Camp,” Garcia said. “We’re probably going to try to have an election for new officers this semester to get some new blood and faces. Since I’m at Mānoa, it would be nice to have some new officers here on campus.”
Besides meeting every Wednesday, the club usually does a big event at the start of each semester.
“We did an event called Prime, which was right at the end of August,” Logue said. “For that event, we did it in the Uala Leaf Cafe. We had free pizza, and we taught everybody how to play different games … we’ll probably do some type of closing event close to the holidays as well. Anyone is welcome to join us. Not just club members, we are open for the whole school.”
For more information, contact Nicolas Logue at logue@hawaii.edu.
by Leighland Tagawa, Ka ‘Ohana Editor in Chief
